


the good ones always seem to break

by basicallymonsters



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bad Flirting, Blood and Injury, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, local half human is so bad at flirting that he needs literal gunfire to up his game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-19 19:10:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15516597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basicallymonsters/pseuds/basicallymonsters
Summary: “This would be a pretty sweet place for an ambush, actually,” Lance says softly. Keith follows his eyes, squinting at the mass of dust that reaches almost to the walls, like a roiling, smoky ceiling.“We already scanned the place, and it’s a ghost town,” Keith says, slipping free of Lance’s grip and forging ahead. “Plus we’re nowhere near the base yet.”“Right,” Lance says, but he’s tapping his helmet and opening up communications anyway, following Keith at a distance. “Hey guys, anyone else feelin’ that warm and fuzzy ‘I’m being watched' feeling?”prompt: Lance jumps in and takes a bullet for Keith when they're separated from the group, and it seems like a fairly minor wound, but the bullet was poisoned, and now Keith has to get Lance back to the castle.





	the good ones always seem to break

**Author's Note:**

> hey if you want this to be atmospheric as fuck, listen to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBUtBrk7yzo) while you read!!

The city is built like a labyrinth, high, sprawling concrete walls with uniform homes and shops built into them, everything coiled tightly around the shining city centre.

It’s a genius kind of protection, Coran tells them, no ship is small enough to land in the heart of the maze, and by the time foot-soldiers are lost in its twists and turns, defence has already sprung into action, soldiers who have been solving the puzzle since childhood.

Allura deploys the paladins to three different entry points — her and Hunk to the East, Pidge and Shiro to the North, and Keith and Lance down South. She gives them each a rough holo-map of how to navigate to the centre, where they think refugees have been hiding with dwindling supplies.

A Galra ship is suspended in nearby territory, close enough to appear in the sky like a moon from the face of Griathen. The implicit threat has kept the citizens behind a barricade for weeks, firing distress signals out into space.

The paladins already ambushed the ship and subdued their forces, so this rescue mission is just a victory lap.

When they ease down onto the windswept surface of the planet, Lance cranes out of his seat, as close as he can get to the window. The capital city rises up out of the dust to meet them, like a beast from the sea. 

“Well that’s ominous,” Lance says.

Keith follows his gaze to the slender, dusty mouth of the Southern entry point, the imperfect slabs of concrete pitched slightly inwards like bared teeth.

“It’s a maze,” he says, shrugging.

Lance scoffs, undoing his harness busily. “Your observational skills have really been honed by your time with the blades.”

“Shut up,” Keith says.

“Wow, snappier comebacks too? Will the wonders never cease,” Lance teases, ducking out of his seat to grab their gear. He flicks Keith in the cheek on his way past.

“We don’t have time for this,” Keith tells him, tracking Lance’s movement across the cockpit, studying the tapering, exaggerated lines of his armour. “We’re losing daylight.” When Lance glances back at him he looks quickly away, securing his bayard against his hip and reaching up to push the release on red’s jaw.

Lance spends a beat too long looking backwards towards the haze around those fortress-like walls, and Keith reaches out with a foot to kick him in the calf.

His leg gives out and he yelps, barely catching himself on a low hanging rafter. He looks back at Keith, disbelieving. “What the hell?”

“Get out of my lion,” Keith says flatly.

“Alright  _bossy_ ,” Lance replies, “a man can’t even stop and enjoy the scenery when you’re around, huh?”

Keith rolls his eyes. “It’s not scenery, and you’re barely a man. Come on.” They stride down the long stretch of Red’s gangway, and the grimy air hits them hard.

“Says the dude with no chest hair,” Lance grumbles.

“I’m not doing this with you.”

“Oh, but you want to do  _something_  with me?” he asks suggestively. He cuts ahead to walk backwards in front of Keith, who speeds up so that Lance almost trips, jogging the wrong way down an incline. He grabs at Keith’s forearms to keep his balance.

Keith can’t figure out why he’s been doing this lately, trying to throw Keith off guard by flipping the switch between fighting and flirting, like some messed up tactic to get ahead.

“Yeah,” Keith says, stubbornly unaffected. “I want to do this mission.”

“Boo, okay,” Lance says, and they hop one by one out onto a barren stretch of sand.

The whole planet is a vortex of grey so light it almost looks like it’s blizzarding, except Keith is already sweating in his armour. The panel of shade cradled in the mouth of the city is sorely tempting. They cross the chasm of the desert slowly, struggling to stay upright in the swirl of sand and debris.

When they finally duck between the walls, backs to the stone, they’re both breathing hard, their visors fogging up.

“Why would the Galra,” Lance pants, “even want to take this shithole?”

“Maybe they want it because it’s so hard to take,” Keith says, squinting into the lukewarm light and open space. Every line of every wall is clean, plain, and nearly identical to the last one.

“That does sound like Galra logic,” Lance groans. “Someone needs to have the ‘consent is sexy’ talk with Sendak.”

“Are you volunteering?” Keith asks, playing along, one hand on his weapon.

“Oh, definitely. I’m going to single-handedly defeat the Galra empire by teaching them sex ed.”

Keith laughs, startled.

Lance grins. “And I could start right here with you, if you want,” he teases, stupid and salacious.

He knocks their shoulders together and Keith’s mind goes blank. “Uhhh. Do you have the map?” he asks quickly.

“Um,” Lance falters. “Yeah dude, one second.” He fumbles for the tablet in their pouch of supplies, and when he pulls the two halves apart, a hologram springs up, glitchy and silvery blue. “Okay so… left up here, and then we hang two rights in a row and go straight for a while. Got it?”

“Got it,” Keith confirms.

They tramp through the barren corridors of the maze, ducking their heads into shallow rooms with destroyed tables and canvas awning out front, passing cubicles that look like they’re built as single-person sleeping quarters, tiny pockets carved out of the walls.

“Tell me this doesn’t remind you of the old west,” Lance says, hip-checking a low swinging door and hopping away when it comes back at him. “The abandoned town, the whistling wind, the heat, the dust.” He says it like he’s narrating a movie trailer. “I keep expecting John Wayne to round the corner with a pistol, ya know?” His face changes, and he looks a little uneasy.

“There’s no one here,” Keith reminds him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lance says, and then he gasps, slapping a hand to his weapon. Keith’s heart makes a dive for it, but Lance just says, “maybe  _I’m_  the John Wayne in this town.” He wiggles his bayard.

“Don’t  _do_  that,” Keith says, punching Lance hard on the arm, but he’s undeterred.

“A more handsome, Latino John Wayne, who like, respects women and stuff.”

They round a corner and face three diverting hallways, and Lance spreads the map open again. Keith glances at it and walks straight forward, but Lance catches him by the arm. When he looks back, Lance’s face is serious, and his gaze is trailing along the tops of the walls.

“This would be a pretty sweet place for an ambush, actually,” Lance says softly. Keith follows his eyes, squinting at the mass of dust that reaches almost to the walls, like a roiling, smoky ceiling.

“We already scanned the place, and it’s a ghost town,” Keith says, slipping free of Lance’s grip and forging ahead. “Plus we’re nowhere near the Griathenian base yet.”

“Right,” Lance says, but he’s tapping his helmet and opening up communications anyway, following Keith at a distance. “Hey guys, anyone else feelin’ that warm and fuzzy ‘I’m being watched' feeling?”

The comms hiss. The wind wails. Lance’s eyes flicker anxiously to Keith’s, and he stops walking.

Finally, there’s a spritz of sound like a hose being turned on, and Shiro’s voice stutters through. “L—ce? —hear me? Comms aren’t—ing—well. Pidge thinks—in the walls.”

Lance holds his helmet over top of his ears like he’s trying to block out background noise.

“Something in the walls? Wait, what? Like something jamming communication?”

“Y—exactly.”

Lance shares another look with Keith, who shakes his head.

“We won’t bother you then,” Lance says. “Nothing to report, just a squiffy feeling. And hey, last one to the middle has to clean out kaltenecker’s pen.”

Disrupted air that might be Shiro scoffing, and then “—ger that. Try—ay focused.”

“Aye aye captain. Over and out.”

“You’re disgusting,” Keith points out as soon as Lance hits mute.

“I’m providing the team with incentive,” Lance says, “it’s called leadership.”

“Stick to the map. It’s called navigation.” They trudge through an archway, and come out into a tiny courtyard, with woody looking flora and spindly hallways outstretched in all directions.

“Is that all I am to you?” Lance asks from behind him. “A hot piece with an eye for directions?”

“Please. You’re just the guy holding the tablet,” Keith says, and he doubles back, striding to the middle of the little room and reaching out to grab the map for himself.

“You just don’t want to admit how badly you need—“ Lance’s teasing smile slips halfway off his face, and he lurches forward like he’s going to tackle him. Keith staggers a couple of steps backward in shock, but Lance grabs him hard around the shoulders and swings him around.

He has a second to register Lance shoving him against the wall with the full weight of his body, his arms folding around Keith’s head so tightly that he can’t see anything. Then there’s a sound like breaking wood, and something impacts Lance’s torso so hard that he rams into Keith with the force of a running start.

He makes a choked sound, and then his whole body slips down Keith’s. He catches him heavily by the elbows, looking down, bewildered, at Lance’s hanging head. When he looks up again, he sees the shape of a Galra sniper across from them taking fresh aim.

Keith forces them both into a duck exactly as a bullet zings into the concrete behind them, and Lance’s legs give out. His knees wag against the ground, but his hands are vice-like on Keith’s shoulders.

“Shit, Lance, come on,” Keith says frantically. His brain is a broken circuit, a twitchy lightbulb that won’t stay lit. He realizes too late, in terrified pieces, that Lance has been shot in the back.

“I’m trying,” Lance says, sounding annoyed. Keith sidesteps another bullet, dragging Lance to his side almost too late. “Controls aren’t working.”

He gets them both behind the nearest wall, watching the flash of the soldier following their movements, and then it’s a mad, adrenaline-fuelled sprint around as many corners as possible. Lance gets his feet under him for a few stray steps, but it’s mostly Keith keeping them two steps ahead of the gunfire.

They duck into an alcove, and Lance finally has long enough to activate his bayard. A blaster unfolds gracefully along the line of his arm as he swings it towards the doorway, and as soon as the sniper enters Keith’s field of vision, Lance has shot him down. He collapses off the side of the wall, and Keith sinks gratefully back, catching his breath.

“Oh fuck,” he says, laughing inappropriately and holding his mouth with the back of a gloved hand. He thinks of Lance’s tight expression when he’d looked up at something Keith couldn’t see or sense. “Sweet place for an ambush.”

“Right?” Lance says, wheezing. “I don’t know why you distrust the gut. It has all our most important organs.”

“Speaking of important organs,” Keith says, scanning Lance’s crumpled body, those long long legs akimbo, his hand clutched over his own side.

“Yeah, about that,” Lance says, reaching up to slide off his helmet. “I’m definitely going to die.”  
  
That’s how Keith knows he’s okay; if the dramatics are intact, then so is he.

“Let me see.”

Lance nods tightly, reaching around to unfasten his chest plate and then crying out. “God _damn_ ,” he curses, “the bastard really got me.”

“I felt it,” Keith says hollowly. He keeps reliving the thunk of it, the way Lance was all around him and then he was dead weight. He crouches down to reach around Lance’s body for him, and he can feel his uneven breaths on his neck. “Since when do they use projectiles and not lasers,” he mutters, peeling Lance’s under-suit down.

“Maybe they—“ Lance pants, “heard my old western idea.”

Keith ignores him, busily detaching pieces and feeling overwhelmed, sweat beading at his brow and inexplicable tears clogging his throat. He shakes his head against all of that feeling.

“Why did you have to do that?” he asks tightly. There’s nothing on his front, so Keith manhandles him into turning over.

His hands go stiff on Lance’s sides when he sees the blood slicking most of his back, but the wound itself is unassuming, tucked to the side, nowhere near his spine.

“Was I supposed to let him get you?”

“You could’ve used your words,” Keith says angrily. “Given me a chance to fight back. Not left me completely powerless.” Tears threaten hotly, so he screws his eyes shut.

“You mean safe?” Lance counters.

He stretches the skin around Lance’s wound, but it’s not bleeding very much. He makes this choking noise though, and it sounds so much like the one he made when he was hit that Keith takes his hands away altogether.

Lance rolls gingerly onto his back, looking up at Keith and then away again. “I wasn’t thinking,” he admits, probably delirious from the pain. “I saw him pointing at you and I—“ he shakes his head, looking disturbed. “I wasn’t thinking. And anyway it doesn’t matter, I’m fine.”

“You’re shot,” Keith snaps. “You made yourself into a human shield.”  
  
“Well excuse me for thinking you’re worth protecting.”

Keith clenches his jaw. His whole head is full of fire, and nothing in it is recognizable anymore. He can’t tell his anger from his fear from his love.

“More of them will be coming,” Keith says slowly. “We need to warn the others.” Lance nods distractedly, brow furrowed. His top half is bare, and it makes Keith uncomfortable to look at, crushed into the dirt and streaked with blood.

He taps his comms open, and calls out into the void. “Anyone there? Guys? It’s a Galra trap. I repeat, it’s a trap. We were ambushed in the third sector of the Southern quadrant. Lance is hurt, and more Galra sentries will be nearby.”

They both wait through the static. Keith watches Lance close his eyes with a dawning sort of panic. He kicks him awake, nodding meaningfully to his torso when Lance gives him a perturbed look.  
  
“I’m not concussed, idiot.”

Keith shushes him. The comms continue to modulate and hiss, but no voices come through.

“Great,” Keith says.

“Hate to say it Keith-o, but we’ve gotta keep moving. We’re still close to where that dude was last stationed, and when they find us we’ll be fish in a barrel.”

“Can you even walk?” he asks doubtfully.

“Can I walk,” Lance mocks. “My legs aren’t the part of me that got shot.”

“Clearly neither is your mouth, because that’s still running.”

“Oh, wordplay, that’s sexy. I didn’t know danger could bring out this side of you, Keith.”

“And we’re standing up,” Keith says, sliding an arm around Lance’s blood-slick waist and hoisting him upright. They overbalance and Lance has to catch himself on the lip of the doorway.

“Jesus  _mary_ , this hurts. Why did no one tell me gunshots were gonna hurt this bad?”

“Every piece of media you’ve ever consumed has told you gunshots hurt.” He holds up pieces of armour for Lance to shrug back on, wincing whenever Lance makes a pained noise.

“I’m just saying that you should feel sorry for me,” Lance tells him frankly, and Keith scoffs.

“You jumped in front of the bullet!”

“Yeah!” Lance agrees loudly. “You should be gratefully weeping and embracing me ‘we almost died’ style.”

“You’re delirious,” Keith says through gritted teeth.

“You’re ungrateful,” he replies matter-of-factly. “Let’s get out of here.” Lance stumbles over his own feet on the way out, but he doesn’t need Keith to balance him, and his gait looks almost normal.

He trains his rifle on the grey rectangles of open space above them, and Keith follows close behind in case he falls backwards. They fall silent, listening for footsteps in the constant whispering of the sandstorm.

He’s impressed by Lance’s constant vigilance, his dead-serious eyes and unfaltering grip on the trigger. He’s only a little unsteady as he tracks both sides of the wall, turning slowly, checking the tablet with the gun cocked on his hip.

 Keith almost forgets that there’s a bullet lost somewhere inside of him, that the Galra most likely outnumber them and have the advantage of height and invisibility.

“I don’t like this,” Keith says quietly.

Lance doesn’t stop squinting down the barrel of his rifle. “Oh yeah?”

“Why are they using different weapons? Why didn’t our sensors pick them up?”

“The Galra work in mysterious ways,” Lance says. “Don’t worry too much about it right now. We’re still in the staying alive part of the mission.”

“You didn’t seem to care too much about staying alive before,” he says bitterly.

“Keith, seriously,” Lance says, exasperated, dropping the arm holding his gun to his side. “Are you  _mad_  at me for that?”

“Forget I said anything.” He fiddles with his own bayard uneasily.

“I keep trying to, and you keep sighing like some—wronged boyfriend.”

“I’m worried about you,” Keith blurts. “I hate that you’re hurt, and I let it happen.”

“Well—I mean. Okay,” Lance says, flustered. “But it’s not…”

He looks down at his abdomen, looking surprised, and then he drops like a stone.

“Lance?” Keith just stands there for a second, looking at where he’s crumpled and unmoving, not really understanding what he’s seeing. And then he’s rushing forward all at once, dropping his weapon in the sand and skidding to his knees.

Lance’s face is wan, and his head is thrown back like he’s too weak to lift it.

“What the hell,” Keith says. He can hear how reedy and panicked his voice is, and he barely recognizes it. He props Lance’s head up with his hand and struggles to take his helmet off again. His hair is drenched in sweat.

His eyes slit open. “I don’t feel so hot,” he murmurs.

“Is the shock wearing off? Is that what this is?” Keith feels quickly for more blood, for fever, for anything.

“Don’t think so,” Lance says, eyes opening properly. His pupils are twin pinpricks in unbelievable blue. “It hurt before, but now it’s worse. Way worse. I don’t know why my body isn’t—“ he tries to make a fist, but his fingers don’t close all the way.

Keith looks up at the empty walls, the stretch in front and behind them that look completely the same. They’re so exposed that it’s like a physical burning on his skin.

“Can you move?”

“Uh. Gimme a sec.” He breathes in and out a couple of times, laboured, and then he seems to use most of his energy to get halfway to sitting. “Keith,” he levels him with a serious look, and he thinks for a second that he’s going to tell him to leave him behind, or something equally ridiculous, but he just says: “we can do this.”

He catches at Keith’s neck, and leverages himself the rest of the way to sitting.

“Hey, not so bad from this angle.” He cracks his neck and shakes his hands out, obviously for Keith’s benefit.

“Let me,” Keith starts, and he shifts into a crouch so that he can lift Lance up off the ground by the armpits. As soon as he’s up he teeters into the nearest wall, and Keith hands him his helmet first, then his bayard.

“Lean against me, okay? We’re taking this maze side by side.”

“Neck and neck,” Lance says sort of hazily, rolling his head to look at him and smile, open-mouthed. “Okay.”

They move as an eight-limbed thing, and side by side they cover almost the full span of some of the passageways. Keith fumbles with the map and his bayard, sometimes leaning over to adjust Lance’s grip when his own bayard slips and the gun wobbles and ceases to exist.

“As far as missions go, this isn’t in our greatest hits, Keith, gotta say.”

“Whose fault is that, huh?” Keith asks, but he can’t tease the gentleness out of his voice. Lance looks so weak, and his helmet keeps knocking against Keith’s when his head droops.

“It’s your fault for not listening to my wise and beautiful guts.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Keith says, holding him tighter, trying to keep Lance together first and himself second.

“Hey, nah, you gotta argue with me,” Lance says. His voice is starting to slur.

“What do you want me to say?” Keith asks, blinking through tears and sweat.

“I dunno. Blah blah blah, I’m a dick. Blah blah, I ignore Lance’s golden instincts, and—and…”

“And what?” The next step Keith takes, Lance’s feet drag underneath him. “Lance? And what?” He reels around and feels for Lance’s pulse, finding it absolutely hammering. He remembers Lance’s pupils, the weakness of his grip, and the strange bullets, and he sobs with realization. “Fuck. The fucking— they poisoned you. Do you hear me?” He props him up against the wall, and keeps him in place with his own body, tapping at his helmet and trying to radio the team again.

“Anyone? Is anyone out there? Anywhere? Please. Please. It’s me, it’s Keith,” he says, choking, looking at Lance’s closed eyes and the dark freckles sprayed down his cheeks, the two that overlap on the tip of his nose. He holds his drooping jaw to keep his face forward. “We need help. Badly.”

There’s no reply, and Keith starts to cry in earnest. Lance’s brow furrows, and he sort of moans, hands lifting weakly to Keith’s forearms.

“Hurts,” he whispers.

“I know,” Keith whispers back. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Lance sighs. “Keith. Are you still running for your life?” He squints. His mouth is so pale.

“I’m running for ours,” Keith corrects, petting at Lance’s helmet stupidly, just trying to stay present. “Do you want to join me?”

“Hell yeah,” Lance says, but when he tries to stand, his body jackknifes and cracks back against the concrete. “Oh.” He coughs, and shakes his head. “My body says no.”

“I’m gonna carry you on my back, okay?” Keith says, already arranging his limbs.

Lance nods, face screwed up in pain. “Okay.”

He clips Lance’s bayard to his hip and wedges himself low against Lance’s body, easing him over so that he’s sprawled out on his back. He straightens slowly, keenly aware of how terrible it must be to have all your pain manhandled like this. 

He hikes him up by the thighs, and Lance turns his face into the back of Keith’s neck. He’s burning up even through his armour, and Keith tries to focus on the heat as a sign that he’s alive.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on Hunk and Pidge when they’re trying to—to make engineering into a game, or whatever. They’re just trying to feel normal.”

“What?”

“Pidge has the best the best head I’ve ever seen, man, and—“ his voice goes tense, shocked through with pain. “Hunk has the best heart. And tell Shiro how great he’s doing, would you? How much we love him. He always keeps everyone together but—but he really needs to hear it.”

Keith shakes his head. “What are you doing.”

“Allura needs someone to be family for her, so be her family, okay? You have a whole lost species to make up for but you’re… you’re pretty good.”

“I’m so mad at you,” Keith says, shaking with rage that he can’t do anything with. He squeezes Lance’s thighs. He hasn’t even looked up in the last seven turns.

“Coran reminds me of my dad, a little,” Lance muses. “Really loud because he really cares. You gotta tell him how much it meant to me… that he took me in. Like a dad.”

“I’m never going to forgive you if you die,” Keith says hoarsely.

“Keith, I really, really wish we had more time.” He’s so lanky and slippery on his back, he feels like he could pop off like an elastic. “Hey, guess what?”

“What?” It’s getting hard to keep walking. The map keeps flickering, Lance keeps sliding down, and the sand underfoot is clingy like mud.

“You’re gonna be okay.” He sounds so lucid. It’s weird how he perked up to deliver this weird, verbal will to him, like he had a backup generator of energy for exactly this purpose, like he was saving it for everyone else, never for himself.

“I’m not,” Keith says thickly.

“You are,” Lance insists. “Even if the end of the maze is a Galra base and our team is all taken hostage and you walk in carrying a dead body as your only weapon—“

“Shut up,” he interrupts viciously.

“You’ll do great. You’re the top of your class. You’re my favourite person in the universe.”

Keith closes his eyes, and slowly stops moving. The gusting wind is starting to sound like constant, mournful crying. He hears a smudge of sound against rock, and he goes absolutely still.

“I really… loved being a part of your team,” Lance says, sounding drunk and sincere. “You make me feel….” his words go soft and broken, and he passes out. 

Keith bites his lip hard, hearing footsteps come nearer, then stop, farther, then stop. Someone is circling, searching for them. Lance is dying, and Keith can’t make a sound.

He creeps a single step forward, and sand crunches beneath his boot. He curses silently, over and over, his heart in his mouth right behind his clenched teeth. Footsteps come faster, and Keith lifts his bayard.

Nothing happens for a heart-stopping second, and then the bayard shimmers into a sleek red blaster. Keith gapes at it, tears drying on his face, and when the two galra soldiers find him, they look as surprised as he feels.

“Hey! He’s over—“

Keith shoots the first one in the chest and he topples off the wall. The other one takes aim, and Keith runs with renewed strength, firing off inaccurate rounds behind him. Lance bounces against his back, and Keith keeps him away from the line of fire as best he can, pulling him awkwardly around to his side, cradling him on his hip like an overgrown child.

He makes an erratic run for it, trying to remember what was on the map and trusting his gut. It’s impossible to run very fast with the whole weight of a body balanced against the socket of his leg, and he’s not a marksmen like lance is.

He can hear the soldier radioing for help, but he’s obviously struggling to multi-task, and Keith takes advantage of his lag, making a couple of wrong turns and then doubling back and plastering himself to the wall around the last corner they took.

He can hear the stutter of feet. He kisses the helmet above Lance’s temple, and prays.

After a terrible minute, the footsteps pick up again, tracking farther and farther away from their hiding spot.

When he’s certain they’re alone, he jostles Lance to his back again, feeling an ache down the entirety of his body. He walks slowly this time, down the centre of each path, keeping his eyes on the grey overhead.

“Hey Lance,” he whispers, “we’re close.” No response. “You gonna let me save your life too?”

The paths are getting wider now, opening up a little. He can hear the faint sound of activity somewhere nearby, the bustle of a city. It doesn’t sound like a Galra base.

“You were right, about everything. As usual.” He peers ahead and tries to imagine seeing anything but grey. He squeezes Lance’s fingers where they’re dangling around his neck.

“Don’t you wanna say I told you so?”

He doesn’t take the bait. His hands are cold.

“Hey guess what,” Keith says. Lance hangs like a dead thing from his body, and he isn’t completely sure that that isn’t what he is, anymore. “I’ve always, always loved you.”

He can hear laughter, somewhere. It seems like some sort of scientific impossibility that someone could laugh, right now, at the end of the world.

He sinks to the ground, laying Lance out on the sand and following him down, like they’re going to bed. The wind cries and cries and cries.

“Keith?”

He looks up.

Hunk is staring at them, horrified, bayard deactivating in his grip. “Help,” he whispers. Then louder, “help! Get help, Pidge, get supplies over here, Lance and Keith are hurt.”

Keith looks into Lance’s face. He can feel Hunk coming over to them, manhandling Lance’s body, listening for breath and feeling for a pulse, asking Keith questions.

“He’s cold,” Keith tells him.

“You’re in shock,” Hunk says.

“Not shock,” He says, memory fluttering like tattered curtains. “It hurt before. Now it’s worse.”

Moments pass. His body aches badly. Someone else is there, and Hunk’s talking to them in hushed tones. “—happened to them?”

“—the same poison.”

“How did they—“

“—must’ve been exhausting.”

“His pulse is really, really weak, Pidge—“

“Someone should get Keith out of here.”

“No,” he hears himself say. “I carried him all the way here.”

“I know,” someone says gently. Shiro, he thinks, from far away. “We need to carry you the rest of the way.”

“The Galra—“ he starts.

“Are taken care of.”

“It never should have happened.”

“They have new tech,” Pidge says. “Some sort of cloaking device and those— those fucking bullets—“

“We captured most of them. Had a few casualties, but none of ours.“

“Lance is one of ours,” he says, confused. He feels like he’s talking through taffy. There’s an uneasy pause.

“He’s not dead, Keith,” Hunk says softly.

“Where is he?”

He’s not holding onto him anymore. He can’t imagine having let him go, but he’s not in his arms or on his back. They’re not even in the labyrinth, he realizes. The grey and the wind are tempered by colour and movement.

He looks up and the paladins are all nearby, looking grim and exhausted. He’s sitting down outside one of the little structures that litter what he can see of the town, and he can tell that he’s lost time. He can smell something burning nearby.

“He’s getting help.”

“I need to see him,” he says, wheeling to his feet. Four sets of hands fly out to stop him.

“You need to see a doctor first,” Shiro says. “I know you’re gonna be stubborn about this, but you’re in shock, and you’ll be helping Lance by helping yourself.”

“Can’t we let him go? What’s he gonna do, un-heal him?” Pidge says.

“It’s not Lance who would be suffering from this encounter,” Allura says tightly.

Keith shakes his head to clear it. “I’m okay,” he says, almost convincing. Time is starting to make a little more obvious sense. They told him Lance was alive, and he knows they wouldn’t lie about that. “I’m okay, but I have to–I told him I would save him, but I must’ve–must’ve passed out.”

“You did save him,” Hunk tells him, squeezing both of his shoulders, eyes glassy.

“He took the bullet for me,” Keith feels compelled to say, like he’s leaving out a crucial part of a confession.

“Idiot,” Pidge mutters.

“Hero,” Shiro corrects.

Keith shakes his head. He’s tired of talking about it like it’s some objective event, like he didn’t just wake up from living it. “I need to see him,” he repeats.

“Okay,” Allura says tiredly. “Okay. I get the feeling we’re only making things worse by keeping you apart.”

The gentle hands barring his way disappear. Hunk hooks a sad smile at him, and leads him by the elbow into the nearest building, stopping just inside the doorway, maybe to give them privacy. His arms cross and his lip wobbles, but he stays fixed at the door. Keith’s guard lets down a little for the first time in hours.

The interior is shadowy, panelled with pale wood but completely windowless. There are walls full of vials, wax tablets covered in writing, and those same woody plants from before.

The burning, Keith realizes, eyeing a collection of glowing instruments, was the physician cauterizing Lance’s wound. He can’t linger on the thought for too long without his eyes watering.

He walks, trance-like, towards the platform where Lance is face-down and stripped to the waist. He doesn’t even look at the doctor working quietly at his side, hanging bags of fluid and mixing herbs into pastes.

Keith’s eyes fix on a little coppery bowl, part of a tray full of frightening looking instruments. When he peers inside he finds the bullet that had been collapsing Lance’s body piece by piece, dragging him unconscious through an endless grey. It’s a tiny, blood-soaked thing crackling with purple energy, some kind of rotten quintessence.

The wound is ugly, infected, and bigger than the last time he saw it. His whole back looks like its contorted around the impact of the gunshot, and his skin seems too dusky to belong to living flesh. The doctor packs the wound with paste and gauze, and Keith swallows uneasily, looking away.

His gaze finds Lance’s upturned face instead, his parted mouth and slicked back hair, still dark with sweat. Keith puts his hand to the pieces that always stick up at the crown of his head, and he exhales all the terror he’s been keeping in his spine, the paralyzing stillness and feral anger.

He kneels quietly, hand sliding from his head to the curve of his jaw.

“You’re my favourite person too,” Keith tells him. His thumb slides against the hollow of his cheek. “Idiot.”

The doctor taps gently on Keith’s hand. Their skin is sun-bleached, with navy patterns running down their arms to their hands, which look almost like they’re dipped in paint. Their face is apologetic, tender with sympathy. “So sorry, paladin. I need to move him, if you’ll let me.”

“Where?” Keith asks sharply. “Why? Right now?”

“Just,” they say, holding out placating hands, “up high enough to wrap his wound.”

“Oh.” He steps awkwardly back and watches the doctor grip Lance’s biceps, maneuvering his upper body so that his head droops heavily forward.

“Wait, let— just let me do it.” He doesn’t know why he feels so protective over every bend and dip in Lance’s body. He wasn’t exactly being gentle with him when they were running and sweating and thumping against the earth and each other.

He reaches out and gathers Lance’s weight onto the front of his body, his head fitting neatly against Keith’s neck. He allows himself to rest his cheek in his hair and breathe.

The doctor wraps silky looking gauze around Lance’s waist, and when he runs his thumb along the seam, it seals against his skin like tape.

“Is he going to be okay?” Keith asks quietly.

“Oh yes,” the doctor says, helping Keith to lower him gently back onto the table. The way they’re looking down at him is pleased, fond. Lance had been unconscious the entire time he was in the room with this person, but he still managed to charm them. “He’s blue, right? Good with water?”

Keith nods jerkily, crossing his arms over his chest so he doesn’t have to focus on the way his heart is racing for no reason, and his arms feel empty without the weight of a body to support.

“Water is creative, healing, resilient. He’s smarter than this galra poison.”

Keith snorts. “I beg to differ.”

“Fire,” the doctor says sagely, eyeing his scuffed red armour. “Stubborn.”

Keith look skeptically to Hunk in the doorway, but he just shrugs, half-smiling.

“I’ve done all I can. And so have you.” They pat Lance’s calf firmly, then cross to the doorway. “Don’t let him move around too much, alright?” They smile warmly and disappear out into the celebration outside, the after-party of a liberation.

“He’s not gonna like that,” Hunk says, and Keith’s mouth twists, amused.

“No. It’s amazing how lazy he is until someone  _tells_  him to sit still.”

“Yeah, and then he’s trying to teach us salsa, right?” Hunk grins at him, eyes bright and knowing. Keith isn’t used to it, the way loving someone can become this whole community experience. His expression must be wrong, because Hunk’s smile fades. “What happened out there, man?”

Keith’s teeth grit. He remembers that first impact of Lance’s body, the coil of his arms protecting Keith’s face, the endless slip to the ground. He can still taste the sweat from the exertion of running. He can feel the soreness of the muscles that Lance’s weight tested when he’d been swung around his side, gangly but heavy. He remembers his voice, drizzling over Keith’s neck with the last of his consciousness,  _you make me feel…_

“We were ambushed.”

“How many?” Hunk asks gravely. Keith faces Lance, touching the clean lines of his shoulder blades, ghosting his fingers over the bandaging.

“Just one. One soldier, one bullet.” His hand reaches the spot where the gauze is thickest, and he can’t bring himself to move any farther.

“How exactly did they outdo a sharpshooter and a former blade of marmora?” Shiro asks from where he’s ducking into the doorway. Pidge follows, going all the way up to Lance’s bedside and plopping down cross-legged in the side chair. Allura leans up against the doorframe opposite Hunk, the pair of them look like some kind of mismatched security team.

“They took him out early,” Keith replies, swallowing hard. “He just kept getting sicker and sicker, and we couldn’t figure it out. He tried to keep walking, but his body was shutting down, and the Galra knew where we were, so–so we had to move as quickly as possible.” He shakes his head. “You don’t realize how loud it is, carrying someone.”

He catches Shiro and Allura exchanging a loaded glance out of the corner of his eye.

“Then my bayard turned into a gun, and I kept firing until I hit something.”

Allura gets this troubled look on her face, and Keith ignores it. He can’t even fathom trying to deal with the mysteries and magic and fear of something bigger than one foot in front of another, or the next ash-grey wall in a maze.

“That’s cool,” Pidge says, thoughtful. “Do you think your bayard transformed based on the range of your target? Maybe it’s equipped to adapt to your needs?”

“I don’t care,” Keith says simply.

“I think it’s like Harry Potter, and his patronus changed to match the person he’s in love with,” Hunk says, sly.

“Are we talking hp?” Lance asks faintly.

“Lance,” Keith chokes before he can stop himself. He drops to his knees at his bedside, and he’s the first person to see those eyes open, deep summer blue.

Lance smiles slowly. “I told you you’d be okay.”

“Fuck you,” Keith says, his voice raw. “I’ve never been that scared. Not for myself. Not for anything.”

“You’re okay,” Lance repeats, scanning his friend’s faces, corners of his eyes crinkling and then drifting closed again.

Keith shakes his shoulder. “You’re not allowed to go to sleep.”

“I was almost fatally poisoned,” he says irritably. 

“A choice that you made,” Keith reiterates. “We’ve already had this fight.”

“And I told you it wasn’t, like, a conscious choice that I made,” Lance says, shifting in place and hissing at the pain. “I mean. You said — said I was just the guy with the tablet.”

“Jesus,” Keith says, closing his eyes. “I didn’t mean it. I never mean it.”

“It’s cool,” Lance says evenly. “It’s just, like. I didn’t want to be the dude who brought a map to a gunfight. I didn’t think about it for even a second. Your back was exposed. You were smiling. I couldn’t just… I mean I  _really_ couldn’t just…”

“Yeah,” Keith says weakly. He would’ve done it too, to save his life. No thinking, no hesitation.

“Is everyone else okay? The Griathenians?”

“Everyone’s been freed,” Allura tells him, beaming.

“Thank god,” Lance says. “This isn’t some kind of prison hospital. I don’t think I’m ready to be some Galra’s slave.” His gaze finds Keith and his mouth turns up wickedly at the corners. “With one important exception.”

Keith flushes, and Lance laughs until his voice stumbles into hurt. He holds perfectly still and breathes through it.

“I’m glad it was me and you though,” Lance says, looking up at Keith from his pillowed arms. “You—were a shithead. Distracted me. Didn’t hurt so much.”

“Romance,” someone says behind them.

“And now?” Keith asks.

Lance shakes his head. “I’m good. Hurts like a gunshot should hurt, I think. Less like I’m being burned alive than before.”

Keith bows his head, forehead to Lance’s hands. They turn over against his scalp and comb through his hair. “No more missions until you’ve spent a week in a healing pod.”

“You don’t have the authority to do that, bucko.”

“No more missions until you’ve spent a week in a healing pod,” Allura echoes, and Lance curses.

“How about no more mazes,” Shiro offers. “Ever.”

“Deal,” Lance says.

“Deal,” they all chorus.

“How about you never get hurt again,” Keith says quietly, small and serious.

“I dunno,” Lance says, mouth twitching. “I’m pretty sure if I do, you’ll carry me anywhere I want.”

It’s a joke, Keith knows it’s a joke, but he still looks up to say, “I’d do that anyway.”

Lance face goes as still and flushed as steamed-up glass, and he says, “I’m gonna kiss you.”

Keith’s chest throbs, a lash of heat, and he nods jerkily.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Pidge says.

“We should give them a minute,” Shiro announces, backing up in the direction of the doorway, dragging Pidge with him. “Not too rough, Keith,” he says, like he’s trying not to laugh.

Keith glares at him. The team files all the way outside, letting the curtain swish over the doorway, and then they’re alone in the shadows, and everything feels so real, and close together. 

Lance presses up into him, and pulls his head down. He remembers hitting the sand, thinking that he’d lost everything, and now he can’t wrap his head around the proof of him, the heat from his body and the tenderness of his hands. 

Lance presses a kiss close to the corner of his mouth, and holds the place that he just kissed like he’s pinning it there for safe-keeping. His mouth ghosts over Keith’s and touches down on the other corner, holding there, lush.

Their noses slide alongside each other, and their warm, tacky skin catches together. Lance’s eyelashes feather over his cheek, and It’s so intimate that Keith’s breath comes out choppy against Lance’s lips, and he reaches up to hold his damaged back as close as he dares.

Lance kisses him properly, his lips chapped and warm, and Keith feels so much for him that it’s like a whole second pulse, shaking him and leading him to the very edge of tears.

It’s so quiet now that he can hear the haunted sound of the wind again, only this time it fits right in between the sound of their shared breaths, and Keith isn’t afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> hey is it bad to inflict constant pain on ur favourite character? asking for a friend


End file.
